Always give credit where it's due

THE criteria used to decide if a researcher deserves to be a coauthor of a scientific paper may vary between institutions, research groups and individuals. Some technicians put in long hours on projects, only to receive an acknowledgment, while in other cases a student's supervisor may be second author despite making only a minimal input, if any. The latter is widely frowned upon, not least by the research student saddled with an unproductive collaborator (see, for example, Bob Ward, Nature, 14 April, 1994), while the technician's input may have been critical. Why does scientific publishing only recognise these two categories - either authorship or acknowledged contributor - without any intermediate level of input? The kudos attached to each of these differs considerably in degree and it is usually the junior scientists associated with a project that suffer.

Indeed, I suspect that one of the most misused words in all science ...

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